Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Blunt Romney and other Spin

Several stories to play with today, all with spin.

One, Blunt Romney visiting the NAACP. Seriously, "Blunt Romney"? Is that some kind of secret street language nickname for Mittens leaked by his staff to give him street cred or just business as usual for the Paper of Record? If you chose latter come collect your prize. Their counterparts mainly hit with he was booed. No doubt the booed headline saturated most mainstream coverage as in, how dare Romney campaign against the current president. That's a personal insult. What next, claiming Obama drove the economic bus into a ditch? Or spitting on Emanuel Cleaver?

The other spin came from a potentially embarrassing story that broke connecting Occupy Wall Street with murder. Early reports said DNA taken from a chain used at an OWS New York event matched that found on the personal effects of a 2004 murder victim. Early reports also said that all forensic personnel in the NYPD crime lab had been cleared of contaminating the evidence. Suddenly the main headline has now transformed into "Possible Lab Contamination...", all thanks to a 'source' in the lab, not the PD. Fit to print with massive font headlines apparently based on one source!

These same folks have held onto the Tea Party spitting story (alluded to above) forever despite Breitbart's cash award for anyone who could actually provide evidence (nobody did) and his later attempt to show up the NAACP as dishonest and bigoted in their approach to the event and the Tea Party in general via the Shirley Sherrod debacle. No surprise, the very same folks also pushed a dishonest and erroneous narrative against noted white Hispanic George Zimmerman by creatively splicing a 911 tape to make him appear racist. No source needed.

Finally, the absentee Jesse Jackson, Jr. story. Early reports said he was being treated for substance abuse, perhaps for alcohol. Now it has changed to "a mood disorder". Give the mainstreamers some credit here, the spin is coming from the congressman's staff. However, reporters by nature are trained to be skeptics and not swallow press releases verbatim, at least theoretically. Or maybe that was just in Bogie movies. Wait, no, they still do that with Sarah Palin. And every other Republican. So let's see if this new explanation satisfies these notorious hungry dogs just like that dog training exercise story back in the 90s gave them reason to shut down another potentially embarrassing investigation.